Nov 29 (Portal) – Henry Kissinger, a diplomatic powerhouse whose roles as national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents left an indelible mark on U.S. foreign policy and won him the controversial Nobel Peace Prize, died on Wednesday at the age of 100.
Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut, according to a statement from his geopolitical consulting firm Kissinger Associates Inc. The circumstances were not mentioned.
It said he would be buried at a private family service, followed by a public memorial service in New York City.
Kissinger was active late in his life, attending meetings at the White House, publishing a book on leadership and testifying before a Senate committee about the nuclear threat from North Korea. In July 2023, he made a surprise visit to Beijing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In the 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War, he was involved in many of the decade’s epochal global events while serving as national security adviser and secretary of state under Republican President Richard Nixon.
The German-born Jewish refugee’s efforts led to U.S. diplomatic opening to China, groundbreaking arms control talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, expanded relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam.
Kissinger’s reign as the chief architect of U.S. foreign policy ended with Nixon’s resignation in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal. Nevertheless, he remained a diplomatic force as secretary of state under Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford, and held strong views for the rest of his life.
While many praised Kissinger for his brilliance and extensive experience, others branded him a war criminal for his support of anti-communist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America. In his final years, his travels were restricted by attempts by other nations to arrest him or question him about past U.S. foreign policy.
His Peace Prize was awarded in 1973 for ending American involvement in the Vietnam War, but it was one of the most controversial ever. Two members of the Nobel Committee resigned over the selection as questions arose about the secret US bombings of Cambodia. North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho was selected to accept the award together, but declined.
Ford called Kissinger a “super-secretary of state,” but also emphasized his irritability and self-assurance, which critics would describe as paranoia and selfishness. Even Ford said, “In his opinion, Henry never made a mistake.”
“He had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew,” Ford said in an interview shortly before his death in 2006.
With his sullen expression and gravelly German-accented voice, Kissinger had the image of a stuffy academic and a womanizer who, in his bachelor days, chased starlets around Washington and New York. Power, he said, was the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Kissinger was outspoken on political issues and remained reserved on personal matters, although he once told a journalist that he considered himself a cowboy hero riding away alone.
HARVARD FACULTY
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923 in Furth, Germany and moved to the United States with his family in 1938 before the Nazis began the extermination of European Jewry.
Kissinger, who anglicized his name to Henry, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1943, served in the Army in Europe during World War II, and attended Harvard University on a scholarship, where he earned a master’s degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1954. He was on the Harvard University faculty for the next 17 years.
During much of this period, Kissinger served as a consultant to government agencies, including in 1967, when he served as an intermediary for the State Department in Vietnam. He used his connections in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to pass information about peace negotiations to the Nixon camp.
When Nixon’s promise to end the Vietnam War helped him win the 1968 presidential election, he brought Kissinger to the White House as national security adviser.
But the process of “Vietnamization”—shifting the burden of war from the 500,000-strong U.S. armed forces to the South Vietnamese—was long and bloody, punctuated by massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the mining of the North’s ports, and the bombing of Cambodia .
Kissinger declared in 1972 that “peace was near” in Vietnam, but the Paris Peace Accords reached in January 1973 were little more than a prelude to the final communist takeover of the South two years later.
In addition to his role as national security adviser, Kissinger was named secretary of state in 1973, giving him unchallenged authority in foreign affairs.
A worsening Arab-Israeli conflict led Kissinger to undertake his first so-called “Shuttle” mission, the kind of highly personal, high-pressure diplomacy for which he became famous.
Thirty-two days commuting between Jerusalem and Damascus helped Kissinger forge a long-term disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
To reduce Soviet influence, Kissinger turned to his main communist rival, China, and made two trips there, including a secret one to meet with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. The result was Nixon’s historic summit in Beijing with Chairman Mao Zedong and the eventual formalization of relations between the two countries.
Former U.S. Ambassador to China Winston Lord, who served as Kissinger’s special assistant, praised his former boss as a “tireless champion of peace” and told Portal: “America has lost an outstanding champion of the national interest.”
Strategic Arms Agreement
The Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign barely affected Kissinger, who had nothing to do with the cover-up and remained secretary of state when Ford took office in the summer of 1974. But Ford replaced him as national security adviser to prevent hearing more voices on foreign policy.
Later that year, Kissinger traveled with Ford to Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, where the president met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and agreed on a basic framework for a strategic arms pact. The agreement crowned Kissinger’s groundbreaking détente efforts, which led to an easing of US-Soviet tensions.
But Kissinger’s diplomatic skills had their limits. In 1975, he was accused of failing to persuade Israel and Egypt to agree to a second-stage disengagement in Sinai.
And in the 1971 India-Pakistan War, Nixon and Kissinger were heavily criticized for leaning toward Pakistan. Kissinger called the Indians “bastards” – a remark he later regretted.
Like Nixon, he feared the spread of left-wing ideas in the Western Hemisphere, and his reactions to this would create deep distrust of Washington among many Latin Americans for years to come.
In 1970, he plotted with the CIA how best to destabilize and overthrow the Marxist but democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, while saying in a memo after the bloody coup in Argentina in 1976 that the military dictators should be encouraged.
When Ford lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger’s days in government were largely over. The next Republican in the White House, Ronald Reagan, distanced himself from Kissinger, who he felt was out of step with his conservative constituency.
After leaving government, Kissinger founded a high-priced, high-performance consulting firm in New York that advised the world’s business elite. He served on corporate boards and in various foreign policy and security forums, wrote books, and became a regular media commentator on international affairs.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head an investigative committee. But outcry from Democrats, who saw a conflict of interest with many of his consulting firm’s clients, forced Kissinger to resign from office.
He was divorced from his first wife, Ann Fleischer, in 1964 and married Nancy Maginnes, an adviser to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in 1974. He had two children with his first wife.
Reporting by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Edited by Sandra Maler
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